Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

 

Wow, it's the first book I've read in like a month.

I found this in the library of a cruise ship after my friend had just finished hyping up the TV show based on this book and it felt like kismet. I'd heard of the book but not actually anything about it, so I went into it completely cold, expecting it to be light chick-lit.

NOPE.

LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY is one of those women's fiction/bookclub type books, where it's like literature-lite. It's also very dark. There's like two attempted sexual assaults and a pretty tragic and graphic on-page death, as well as a tragic and semi-graphic recount of a loved one deciding to unalive themselves. Luckily, someone on Instagram warned me about the trigger warnings but I could see someone taking a look at that cutesy rom-com looking cover and being totally taken off-guard if they didn't know what they were getting into.

I would have given this a higher rating if the author hadn't made the questionable decision to narrate parts of this book from the dog's POV (a preternaturally smart dog who knows over 600 words of English and can talk to babies in the womb) and create a stereotypically precocious child character who is eight years old but reads Nabokov and Norman Mailer, and argues with her teacher about science.

The best part of this book was unquestionably the hilarious joke about poisoning douchey husbands with poisonous mushrooms and then claiming it was an accident. That's the kind of dark humor my sick and twisted brain finds funny. But that kind of dark humor is also at odds with child wizards and magical dogs in a story about historical girl-bossing that kind of feels like it also hates women.

But hey, I read it. Yay me.

2.5 out of 5 stars